From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Sep 19 14:17:25 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F3F001065679; Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:17:24 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from lacombar@gmail.com) Received: from mail-wy0-f178.google.com (mail-wy0-f178.google.com [74.125.82.178]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2507F8FC14; Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:17:23 +0000 (UTC) Received: by wyf23 with SMTP id 23so6763992wyf.37 for ; Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:17:23 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject:from:to :cc:content-type; bh=i94qpb5z18OJbHbgXzBTuhnjB7mI7s8NTZma90B6VL8=; b=PjQnrofQwa/vl8FXuYSj3pEDL1jCWMIfCiIX5Ht5VKOqdnufyDcMiBp5dGjC4v1rH3 HFLGSZGsex75ErjlpILEcEpthv8Pw4aHAwfTF/1pZhqoGeEX5M/OTmxYHJdVCt6zcohY lcfI1ftnz7s/r2AIuY9sZUZWpOndW7UR8N/kc= MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.227.28.69 with SMTP id l5mr2853032wbc.38.1316441842780; Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:17:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.180.95.169 with HTTP; Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:17:22 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: References: <4E744BCE.7060302@sepehrs.com> <20110917203218.GC13993@michelle.cdnetworks.com> <20110918210647.GA8930@onelab2.iet.unipi.it> <20110919020131.GA11657@onelab2.iet.unipi.it> <4E76E5B9.9080301@sepehrs.com> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:17:22 -0400 Message-ID: From: Arnaud Lacombe To: Adrian Chadd Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Cc: pyunyh@gmail.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Hooman Fazaeli , Jack Vogel , jfv@freebsd.org, Luigi Rizzo Subject: Re: intel checksum offload X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:17:25 -0000 Hi, On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote: > Arnaud (and others), > > Liaising with vendors is not an easy task. The reason why Intel (and > other vendors) don't supply detailed history and reasoning for their > development efforts is that their engineers are likely tasked with > "making it work" versus "writing lots of stuff down for public > release." In some instances, the vendor support of FreeBSD (and "free" > open source in general) is done as a side-project by some of the > engineers inside the company. > > So in this case, you may find that Jack and the other engineers at > Intel just don't have the time or resources to dedicate the kinds of > feedback and support you seem to be after. He and others likely have a > huge set of tasks to do at work and none of them officially include > "support FreeBSD/Linux developers by providing detailed feedback and > assistance." So whenever Jack pops up to help out, he's likely doing > it in his spare time. :-) > Yes, and he seems to really like to waste his spare time by repeating me for two months to increase `kern.ipc.nmbclusters' to fix issue I was seeing, when the code was clearly buggy, even when I sent him patchs fixing issues. That's sure a very efficient way of managing time. - Arnaud > Developers can and will disable or remove functionality which is > problematic because they don't have the time or resources to support > it. Users may wish to turn on unsupported features and then will > complain loudly when they don't work; even giving up and moving to > another piece of equipment because of perceived issues. I agree that > it would be nice if the developers included _all_ features, > unsupported or not, so that developers can choose to work on them if > they wish. It however is a trade-off between trying to provide > developers with more useful things to tinker with and not increasing > support load from users (and other developers) who seek to use > incomplete features. > > I hope this helps. > > > Adrian >